GRAPHIC WARNING: This article contains details that readers may find embarrassing.
A man testified during the murder trial that he thought he was in an illusion or video game while stabbing a seven-year-old girl and her mother was trying to fight him.
David Moss, who wants a ruling that he is not responsible for the second-degree murder of Bella Rose Derosiers, said on Friday that the voice of the demon who told him to harm the girl had subsided since he began taking medication.
He also no longer believes in alien conspiracies, 5G technology, jet streams, raindrops, spiritual awakenings and COVID-19, as he did moments before Bella was found in a pool of her blood, Moss told an Alberta court trial. at Queen’s Bench.
“I believed I would be abducted (by aliens) or abducted,” said Moss, 36.
“When you had visions of being abducted by an alien, do you believe that today?” Moss, defense attorney Rod Gregory, asked Moss.
“Honestly, no,” he replied.
Moss testified that he grew up in sexual, physical and verbal abuse in a household in Holden, Alta. He said his parents started giving him sips of alcohol when he was about nine years old and taught him spirituality. He also smoked marijuana regularly as he grew up, he said.
He told the court, he said in the court, expelled from school after 10th grade and moved to Edmonton when he was 17. After someone threw a stone at his head and smashed his scalp, he could not speak properly and began to have memory problems, he said.
A year after the injury, he met his wife and they had four children together, he testified. He said he suffers from anxiety and in 2019 he was prescribed medication for voices that he hears but does not take much.
In March 2020, after the COVID-19 pandemic forced him to close his tattoo shop, his belief in conspiracies and spiritual awakening intensified, Moss said.
“Everything was an illusion, I believed,” he told the court. “I just thought I was awake and everyone was asleep… They weren’t on a spiritual journey.”
Moss then began posting on social media that COVID-19 vaccines had microchips.
GRAPHIC WARNING: The following details may be confusing to some readers.
Prior to Moss’s testimony, his lawyer released videos in court of Moss hitting his head on a bed in his cell and pulling out his front teeth while in custody. Officers entered the bloodied room and took him away.
A video was also released in which Moss attacked a medical worker. He strangled her as the guard hit him repeatedly before releasing him. He testified that he also tried to hang himself while being detained at the Edmonton Detention Center.
The trial has already heard from Moss’s estranged wife and sister about how his mental health took a final and strange turn days before Bella’s throat was cut with scissors.
Moss was a new friend of the girl’s mother, Melissa Derosiers, and he had stayed at her home so she could take him to the hospital to get help with suicide thoughts he had expressed the other day.
The court said that Desrosiers took Bella and her younger sister from their aunt’s house and arrived with Moss at her house.
While he took a shower, Derosier took his daughters to their bedroom for the night. Their aunt had to look after a child while Derosier took Moss to the hospital.
The court was told that Desrosiers was preparing to kiss Bella goodnight when Moss, wearing only shorts, appeared on the doorstep. He was holding scissors he had taken out of a kitchen drawer.
A statement of the facts said that Moss pushed Derosier aside and began to cut Bella in her neck with a 20-centimeter blade. Desrosiers struggled with it as she told her other daughter to run to the bathroom and lock herself inside.
Moss dragged Bella to the main floor of the house and continued to cut her neck. The girl was found by the police almost beheaded, the statement said.
Moss told his wife, Tracy Couture-Strarost, earlier in the day that he wanted to hurt her, commit suicide and sexually assaulted a young cousin.
Couture-Strarosta testified that she called Edmonton police and asked them to take him somewhere. A crisis response team evaluated him and scheduled another meeting at 4:30 p.m. that day, but he never left.
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on June 10, 2022.
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This story was created with the financial support of the Meta and Canadian Press News Fellowship
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